Product Code Database
Diplopedia, billed as the Encyclopedia of the United States Department of State, is a wiki running on a State internal Intranet, called "OpenNet". It houses a unique collection of information pertaining to diplomacy, international relations, and Department of State tradecraft.
The wiki may be used by U.S. foreign affairs agencies domestic and abroad with State intranet access. It is also available to the United States intelligence community and other national-security related organizations using the Intelink-U network as a mirrored, read-only archive. Both sites are rated by the government as sensitive but unclassified. The wiki on either network is not open to the public.
Diplopedia is a project of the Office of eDiplomacy (eDip), located in the Bureau of Information Resource Management within the Department of State. Diplopedia uses MediaWiki, the same software used by the Wikipedia free-content encyclopedia project.
The program began as part of a larger effort created by former Secretary Condoleezza Rice within the concept of Transformational Diplomacy. Under that plan, personnel utilized Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, , communities, and virtual work environments to provide diplomacy to areas that have been underrepresented. The program continued under Secretary Hillary Clinton's vision of diplomatic smart power, which also relied heavily on new media to include the web, blogs, and wikis, in concert with commercial online media distribution including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
At Wikimania 2008, eDiplomacy revealed the state of the wiki as of July 2008. In a presentation entitled "Diplopedia: Wiki Culture in the U.S. Department of State", the overall Diplopedia project hosted more than 4,400 substantive articles, is edited by 1,000 registered users, and has had 650,000 page views.
In January 2009, Diplopedia was among 27 online technologies named as "The Best Government Tech of the Bush Years" by Wired.
By February 2010, the wiki had grown to 10,000 articles by over 2,000 contributors.
As reported at Wikimania 2012, Diplopedia surpassed 5,000 editors and 16,300 articles. In 2020, Diplopedia achieved 89,000 registered users and over 30,900 articles.
Desk officers rotate out of their positions every two years and often have little lead time to learn the scope of their new job. Diplopedia provides a desk officer manual, advising them on everything from what to make of Department jargon, how to move a paper for decision, or how to navigate a new Ambassador through the complexities of Senate confirmation and assignment to his or her mission.
Forty briefing portals help Department employees find and contribute information on specific programs, economic issues, and international politics. Recent additions are part of a working space for foreign policy experts to share and collate information that underpins the Department's efforts to address a major global issue which encompasses economic, political, human rights and population concerns.
Diplopedia has a unique categorization of and acronyms (pervasive in government). Each is placed in Category:Abbreviation and most point to articles on the topic the abbreviation represents. Information is also grouped by categories familiar to diplomats and lay people alike such as Missions Abroad, Offices, Information Technology, and Security. Diplopedia also contains non-encyclopedic content including notes and items of internal, administrative interest.
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